It's a good time to be an artist up here in the north. On top of the Northern Art Prize, now in its fifth year and with £20,000 to hand out, a new award for painters in our three regions has been announced.

The New Lights Prize is worth £10,000 for the winner and aims to help budding amateur talent go professional, by supplementing the cash with business mentoring and exhibition opportunities.

It was the idea of Annette Petchey, a London businesswoman who wisely relocated to York where she also serves as a JP. Her debut judges will be Kate Brindley, director of MIMA - Middlesbrough's excellent Institute of Modern Art, Paul Hobson, director of the Contemporary Arts Society and the artist William Tillyer, originally from the North East.

Petchey says: "Aspiring young painters in the north have the odds stacked against them. The low prices that good quality paintings fetch outside London and the South East means those artists simply cannot afford to turn professional. This prize will recognise, nurture and promote young talent. It will also provide a superb platform for other shortlisted artists to exhibit their work"

Entrants must be aged 23-35 and live in one of the counties of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Northumberland, Cumbria and Durham; paintings have to be in oil, acrylic, watercolours or mixed media. Find out more via New Lights or download a form from info@newlights.org.uk. Then get out those brushes…

Doing time, or temps, or zeit...

Staff are having a slightly easier time at Haverigg prison in Cumbria, reports the Carlisle News and Star, because the number of foreign inmates has shot up from one to 120 in just a year. The category C jail proved handy in 2009/10 – the period just reported-on by its independent monitoring board – for housing foreign nationals who had finished their sentences for various crimes, but needed keeping in custody pending detention.

Why easier? The report says that the foreigners cause less trouble than British inmates and are therefore considered "an asset overall." British prisoners get fed up because the jail is so far away from homes and families, in most cases. The widerl sense of remoteness also seems to affect them more.

This repeats history, to the extent that the German officers taken prisoners in the Second World War much enjoyed their quarters at Grizedale Hall in the Lake District, whose comforts were criticised at the time in Parliament with sobriquets such as 'the U-boat hotel.' The great exception was the best-known German escaper, the fighter pilot Franz von Werra, who made one of his many hops over the wall from the mansion. That one didn't work, but he got away later from a camp in Canada.

Weekend duties - and delights

Don't forget that it's Census Day on Sunday. There are plenty of us who still need to fill in and send off our forms. The Grimsby Evening Telegraph reports that three-quarter of people in Lincolnshire have yet to get things sorted, although enumerators lavish praise on Grimsby's East Marsh area, where almost half have gone through all 32 pages of the form.

What else to do? If it stays sunny (but I'm afraid the weather people are bit gloomy about that) the wild daffodils are coming into bloom in Farndale on the edge of the North York Moors. The main visitor rush is in early April but the valley's already a wonderful sight, and the countryside for miles around is ravishing, extremely walker-friendly and full of pubs.